Suzanne Vega: Now the story behind 'Tom's Diner' can be told

Turns out Suzanne Vega is just as compelling a storyteller in prose as she is in song. Courtesy of the New York Times, here’s her essay on the fascinating history of her 1987 song “Tom’s Diner,” from her composition of the tune in the Upper West Side eatery it later helped make famous, to the Seinfeld connection (as the restaurant and its iconic signage, pictured, became the model for Jerry and Co.’s coffee shop hangout) to Vega’s own crash-course in copyright law when DNA’s version and other remixes became grass-roots hits, to the use of her pristinely produced a cappella version as the sonic yardstick by which the inventors of the MP3 perfected their revolutionary compressed digital music file. Read here, and see if you can’t get that “Doot doot doo doo…” refrain out of your head for the rest of the day.